Posts tagged "corporations"

If you spend the time and expense to incorporate your small business, then you should make sure you observe the corporate formalities. There are many reasons for observing corporate formalities. The most important reason is that if you don’t, you are leaving yourself open to someone trying to “pierce the corporate veil”—getting at your personal assets for the liabilities of the corporation. This blog describes the corporate formalities for a small business.

At one time or another there will be an end to your business. When you started your business, you should have developed an exit strategy, but sometimes things don’t go as planned. The business may end happily in a merger or acquisition and sometimes less happily by dissolution or bankruptcy. Without clear guidelines at the outside, you will find that extricating yourself from your partners may be costly. A business divorce may have similar acrimony to a family divorce. In a family divorce, there is the combustible combination of kids and money. In a business divorce, the business partners undoubtedly will also argue about money—and will contend for control over their business, which for founders, can be like an extension of their families. The disputes among partners are not easy disputes. And business divorces like their family counterparts have numerous moving parts in various areas of the law such as business organizations, contracts, unfair trade practices, employment law and trade secrets. This article summarizes some of the considerations you should keep in mind when discussing with your small business lawyer what steps you and your partners should take to minimize the risk of a messy divorce with your partners down the line.

Your startup attorney may suggest that you look at the S corporation and LLC as the two most attractive options for forming your new business. There are a number of considerations for you to keep in mind for your startup business and for you to decided on a LLC or S corporation. They generally fall into four major categories: Protecting personal assets: the business owner wants to assure that the new business’ creditors can only get at the assets of the business, not those of the individual owners; Transferring interests in the business: whatever form you have, you want to be able to transfer stock, or ownership interests in your business; Admitting new investors: you want to make sure that you have a mechanism to admit or restrict new investors in the business; Taxes: which corporate form allows you to pay the least amount of taxes. In this blog post, I am going to focus on two of the most common forms available for small businesses: S corporations named after subchapter S in the tax code, and limited liability companies (LLCs). New business owners generally like the flexibility of the limited liability companies over a corporation and they can still have their LLC taxed as a C corporation or S corporation if they want and can qualify.